[Monday Musings] Art Games: Reality vs. Potential

[This week’s all-new Monday Musings tackles the issue of “art games”, and how we’ve largely been doing it wrong.]

If A Tree Falls In the Forest…

One of the apparent principles of “high art” – in any medium – seems to be the expectation of a certain amount of effort on the part of the audience to understand the work, a concept elegantly described by the phrase, “You get out of it what you put into it.” When it comes to “art games”, however, this idea seems unnecessary, and tends to be badly abused.

Some creators have something substantial to say, and appear to do so effortlessly, producing art that resonates and endures. Other creators have little to say, or a poor idea of why they want to say it, but they nevertheless aspire to emulate their more focused counterparts. Often, such creators appear to have learned the wrong lessons from their role models: specifically, that a work that is hard to understand is more “arty” than one whose significance is immediately clear.

This leads to a kind of willful obfuscation of the meaning of a piece; an attempt – perhaps conscious, maybe unconscious – to mask the work’s fundamental lack of meaning. The misguided creator ultimately seeks to emulate the electrifying experience of total identification with a piece, but in fact succeeds only in emulating the frustration of failing to understand it, and then justifies the failing by falling back on the “You get out of it what you put into it” argument, retreating into a faux-elitist ivory tower from which to throw stones at the “uncultured masses”.

The idea that obscurity somehow increases the significance of a piece is wrong-headed and self-destructive. As goes the classic riddle, “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s around to hear, does it make a sound?” so too we can ask, “If an artistic work expresses an idea and nobody understands it, did it express anything at all?”

Experience Is Universal

It is fairly common for “arty” literature, music, and films to require some effort on the part of the audience to achieve full understanding of and identification with the piece. This idea has been applied to art games, and in fact appears to be at the core of today’s definition of “art game”, but this approach entirely fails to embrace games’ unique advantage: the universality of experience.

Literature, music, and film are passive media: ideas are presented in fixed form, and the audience reacts to those ideas. As such, deep emotional experiences must arise from empathy:

empathy
noun
the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Empathy is a skill, to be learned and practiced. When we say of fixed-media art pieces that “You get out of it what you put into it”, empathy is “what you put into it”. But some people are less empathic than others, and the value placed on empathy varies from person to person. It’s no surprise, then, that as fixed-media works require a more refined sense of empathy they simultaneously become increasingly niche.

Art games need not succumb to this fate. In games, the audience is having an experience, rather than empathizing with one. To experience is not a skill to be learned or practiced; rather, it is innate to the human condition. The problem of obscurity can be avoided for games by adopting an audience-centric rather than character- or plot-centric approach, thereby capitalizing on the universality of experience.

Breaking the Rules

In addition to willfully obscuring their meaning (if they have one at all) and creating indirect, empathy-driven experiences in what should be a directly-experienced participatory medium, art games have shown a fondness for breaking established rules and principles of game design, often for no apparent reason other than to be, essentially, “counter-culture”.

It’s not unexpected for there to be questioning of these rules, given the relative youth of our medium. And looking at the histories of other media, we see ample evidence of experimentation with contemporary rules leading to major creative movements with enduring significance (e.g. the Renaissance). However, when the rules of a medium are broken, it should be done for a well-considered reason.

Too often, art games shatter established conventions simply to be “different”. Any break with convention runs the risk of alienating the audience, and with art games already having willful obscurity and an inappropriate focus on empathy stacked against them, they can’t afford to jettison conventions the purpose of which are to anchor players in something, anything, familiar.

To be blunt: breaking the rules of game design without a damn good reason doesn’t make you “arty”, it just makes you suck. And if you’re thinking your game isn’t “arty” enough and you’re considering breaking a few rules to address that, then what you really need to do is go back to your fundamental concept and ask yourself if you had something of significance to express in the first place; odds are good that you didn’t.

Art Is Passion, Not Engineering

You can’t engineer art. The intangibles that make an experience satisfying, fulfilling, and significant are not quantifiable; you can’t dispassionately engineer them, and you’re not likely to stumble into them by accident. They come from the creator’s irrepressible passion for the work, and the audience can sense that passion, even if only subconsciously.

Creators should have passion for their concept, something to say or express that must come out, no matter what. They should also have passion for their medium: their idea must be expressed interactively, because no fixed medium can do it justice. And finally, they should have passion for their audience: it’s not just about creating an experience, it’s about sharing that experience, and if nobody can understand what you’re saying, then you’re not really expressing anything at all.

[Monday Musings] Shrink to Success

[This week's Monday Musings article is a repost of my submission for Game Design Aspect of the Month for April 2009. All-new Monday Musings content will resume next week.]

Shortly after the success of Portal, a movement for shorter games began to form. It hasn’t gained much momentum in the mainstream, but game designers are beginning to recognize the advantages of “short-form” games, and I predict that producers and publishers will join the chorus within the next few years.

When I say “short-form” games, I’m speaking comparatively. A short-form game, for purposes of this discussion, is one which is significantly shorter than a mainstream AAA title; specifically, a game of roughly 2-4 hours in length, regardless of genre. The establishment of specific duration criteria implies that the game is at least somewhat driven by narrative, if not largely so; for example, it would be difficult — if not impossible — to quantify the duration of Tetris, so such non-narrative games are omitted from this discussion.

Short-form games can be uniquely compelling in ways their longer cousins can’t. For starters, their shorter duration necessarily eliminates “filler” gameplay, resulting in a more-or-less uninterrupted state of player education. This is compelling because, at their core, games are learning machines. The process of play is a cycle of learning, then applying:

When new concepts are being learned — whether they’re mechanics, environments, characters, or plot situations — player engagement rises. When known concepts are subsequently applied, or “tested”, engagement may begin high, but quickly falls as the application of the concept becomes repetitive; this is “filler” gameplay. The education of new concepts introduces novelty into the game flow and helps maintain player interest over time, but filler — too-long periods of application without learning — breaks the game flow and ultimately bores players.

Short-form games don’t have room for filler; thus, short-form games need not break the flow of education. New concepts can be educated to the degree necessary to ensure mastery, then applied for just long enough to provide validation of the new skill (and no longer!) The learn-apply cycle is compressed, resulting in greater overall player engagement:

Short-form games also tend to be more focused, in terms of both gameplay and story. Less overall content means room for fewer mechanics and fewer plot points, so short-form designers have to make the most of what they have. Portal, for example, has very few mechanics:

• Fire blue portal
• Fire orange portal
• Pick up (and drop) objects (e.g. Weighted Companion Cube)
• Turrets
• Crushing pistons
• Jump pads
• Bouncing energy balls (with matching conduits)

By contrast, Grand Theft Auto IV:

• Driving (cars)
• Driving (motorcycles)
• Helicopter piloting
• Melee combat
• Gun combat
• Cover system
• Cell phone
• Bowling
• Darts
• Pool
• Drunk-driving (and drunk-walking)
• “Wanted” system
• Vigilante missions
• Internet cafes
• Clothing customization
• Safehouse customization

That GTA4 has a longer list of mechanics than Portal is neither surprising nor disturbing. But try ticking off, for both lists, the mechanics which were implemented poorly, and a very different picture quickly emerges. A major strength of short-form games’ necessary focus is that while they contain fewer mechanics, those mechanics are generally of a more uniform, and higher, quality.

The same goes for game stories. The stories in Braid, Knytt Stories, and World of Goo are simple, digestible, and most importantly, thematically and ludo-narratively coherent. By contrast, the stories of games like Metal Gear Solid 4 are sprawling, often incomprehensible, and packed with useless information and a low proportion of memorable moments. Not that I support games uncritically aping film, but there’s a useful maxim in screenwriting that applies to writing scenes: “Get in late, get out early.” The idea is that by presenting only the most irreducible core of a scene you increase audience comprehension of that scene, and by extension its impact and memorability. Put another way: distracting the audience with irrelevant or redundant content not only makes that content suck; it also drags down the perception of the “good stuff”.

So far, it all boils down to focus: short-form games are necessarily more focused than long-form ones, and therefore less likely to break the flow of player education or distract the player with meaningless content, leading to an ultimately more engaging experience. But there are several financial benefits to short-form games as well, and these are arguably more likely to make allies of producers and publishers.

First, the average gamer is 35 years old. That means he or she is likely to be employed full-time and to have a family, or at least a spouse. This is not a person with a lot of free time. Films are an enduring entertainment medium because they run about two hours, which isn’t difficult at all to fit into an otherwise busy schedule. 60-hour gaming extravaganzas are a whole different story, but a quality 2-4 hour game can be completed in a sitting or two and not feel like an endless slog. A ubiquity of 2-4 hour games would place games firmly in the same “impulse buy” space as movies and music, for the simple reason that consumers would no longer see games as a significantly greater time investment than those mediums.

However, even if such a ubiquity came to pass, games are still seen as a financial investment, due to the unconscionable $59.99 standard price point. The most common argument given by publishers at the beginning of the 360/PS3 generation for the price increase was that “next-generation” games were more difficult and, critically, more expensive to develop. While it is true that game development budgets increased significantly from the PS2/Xbox generation to the 360/PS3 generation, they are still, with the exception of a very few outliers, far below the average budget of a feature film. The key difference, as I have argued previously, is the difference in audience size. $10 DVDs sell to tens of millions of consumers and make a handy profit on $100 million dollar films. If a game sold to tens of millions of consumers, it wouldn’t need to be priced at $60 to make a profit on its measly (by comparison) $20 million development budget. And if you’re wondering where we find those extra customers, all you have to do is lower your price point.

But for the sake of argument, let’s indulge these publishers’ assertion that higher prices are necessitated specifically by higher development costs. Short-form games have dramatically lower development costs than long-form ones; notable short-form indie titles like Braid and World of Goo were done in their entirety for under $200,000. Such lower development costs should make reduced game pricing a non-issue, and as Valve’s data shows, reduced game pricing is highly likely to result in dramatic increases in net revenue… and that’s before we even factor in the short-form game’s superior focus, consistency, and ludo-narrative coherence, and the subsequent word-of-mouth and goodwill boost it’s all but guaranteed to receive!

It’s no coincidence that games whose duration is nearer that of films are likely to prove more compelling in many respects than 60-hour epics. Short-form games necessarily hold sacred the all-important flow of player education, keeping engagement high by avoiding filler and redundancy. They are more tightly focused, presenting a better-integrated set of mechanics and superior ludo-narrative coherence. They are cheaper to produce, which means they can be sold at a price point that supports impulse purchases, and good data suggests that price-point will actually increase net revenue. They fit sensibly into the average gamer’s schedule, all but eliminating the negative perception that games must be a significant time investment. And perhaps most importantly, they are small enough to be memorable in their entirety, rather than recalled in disparate pieces tainted by a plurality of poor experiences.

Presented with such a win-win package, why would producers and publishers not jump on board?

(This article was originally published at Game Design Aspect of the Month.)

[Monday Musings] Breaking In? Make Games!

[Due to recent, heavy demands on my time, this week's Monday Musing is a repost of an article I published in January on breaking into the games industry.]

“How do I break in to the games industry?”

This is the single most common game development-related question I’ve encountered in every community and on every forum and website I’ve ever interacted with. I’ve heard lots of answers, too:

• Get a degree. You’ll never get into game development without one.
• Know the right people. You’ll never get into game development without contacts.
• Be in the right place at the right time. You’ll never get into game development without luck.
• Be persistent. You’ll never get into game game development if they don’t know you’re there.
• Start in QA. You’ll never get into game development if you don’t pay your dues.

In my opinion, all of those answers are wrong. You want to know how you really get into the industry?

Two words: “MAKE GAMES”.

It’s really that simple. Once you’ve made a game, there’s no question whether you know what you’re doing: you’ve already done it. After that, getting a game design job is no different from getting a job at your local Wendy’s.

I’m speaking from experience: shortly after high school I built Gem Feeder, a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004, as well as a handful of levels for the same game. Those projects got me my first game design job. (Interestingly enough, they also got me my second, despite now having professional experience on my resume.)

But let’s step back for a moment, and discuss in more detail why I’m throwing so much conventional wisdom under the bus.

“Get a degree”

I firmly believe that getting a degree — any degree — has nothing whatsoever to do with getting a job. College is about education, not employment. Don’t think that piece of paper is going to automatically open all the doors for you; it’s not a magic key to the games industry. If you’re going to get a degree, do it because you genuinely want to know stuff. Do it for its own sake.

I’ve been a game designer for almost five years, and I never got a degree. But I did make a game.

“Know the right people”

Knowing the right people is certainly helpful in any endeavor, not just job-hunting, but connections are by no means critical to the process. You don’t need to be friends with the boss’s nephew to get a job; if you lean on that crutch, you’re selling yourself short.

Studios post their job openings publically; check their websites, or online resources like Gamasutra’s Job Seekers page.

You don’t need someone to vouch for you. If you’ve made a game, your work will speak for itself.

“Be in the right place at the right time“

This is just plain old-fashioned stupid. Life isn’t about luck, or waiting for opportunities to land in your lap. You can learn the right place and the right time, then put yourself there.

Watch job listings for this information, then make your presence known with a resume and a link to your game.

“Be persistent”

This is only good advice if you are already qualified. Unfortunately, some people misinterpret this as, “I’ll annoy the hell out of someone until they take pity on me and make me a game designer; only then can I start learning how to design games.”

There is nothing stopping you from making a game right now. Apply your persistence to making a game, not making some studio’s HR person’s life a living hell.

“Start in QA”

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve read the assertion, “Nobody gets hired straight into game design!” I’d be a rich man. Of course, you can start in QA if you like, and in most cases it’s true that once you’re employed by a studio in any capacity, getting into the position you want becomes easier. But why does QA have to be the stepping stone?

If you want to be a game designer, then “pay your dues” by making a game, not testing someone else’s. I’ve never worked a day of QA in my life… but I did make a game.

The conventional wisdom does have its advantages, of course. But treating any — or even all — of the above maxims as the de facto keys to your first game design job is just misguided.

Instead, MAKE GAMES.

If you lack skills, learn them. (You probably don’t need college for this; we live in the Internet Age, after all.)

If you lack time, re-arrange your priorities. You do want to be a game designer more than anything else in the world… right?

If you lack resources, conform your game’s scope to work with what you have. Small, focused mods — like Gem Feeder — are good projects in this regard.

If you think this all sounds like too much work, then do yourself a favor and switch career paths now. It doesn’t get any easier after you “break in”. In fact, it gets a hell of a lot harder. If that’s off-putting, then you’re in the wrong line of work. But if it’s exciting, then you’ll have no problems at all.

Sense of Entitlement, Much?

This kind of thing pisses me off:

A user group which opened within the last few days on Valve’s Steam Community is actively calling for a boycott of [Left 4 Dead 2] and has nearly 17,000 members as I write this. [...]

The group also has requests [sic]:

• That Valve honor its commitment to release ongoing periodic content for Left 4 Dead.
• That Left 4 Dead 2 not be released as a stand-alone, full-priced sequel but as either a free update to Left 4 Dead or an expansion with full compatibility with basic Left 4 Dead owners.
• That Left 4 Dead owners be given discounts for Left 4 Dead 2, should it be released as premium content.

I’m sick and tired of these stupid internet petitions complaining that fucking awesome shit is somehow not awesome enough, and that we therefore deserve to get it for free, or for a discount, or whatever. This blatant sense of entitlement is an embarrassment to the gaming community. It makes gamers look childish, immature, selfish, and petty.

Shut up and let Valve make their game. If you don’t like what they produce, then walk away. But don’t be so arrogant as to expect to bend them to your will with your angry internet petition.

[Monday Musings] A Technique of Frustration

[This week's article takes a look at frustration as a design tool, how it is used as a gateway to sensations of achievement and fiero, and how "casual" gamers may actually appreciate frustration more than their "hardcore" counterparts.]

Evidence of Conflict

Every story involves a character struggling through a conflict. Importantly, characters never overcome conflict on their first try; this would present a very short story indeed, suggesting that the conflict was never particularly potent and thus hardly worth fighting. Instead, characters must try and fail — have their efforts frustrated — multiple times before succeeding. Each failure raises the stakes, further investing the character and the audience in the conflict and increasing the sense of triumph when success is finally achieved. In this way, frustration is the evidence of conflict.

While games often tell the story of a character in conflict, the interactive nature of games also gives rise to a parallel story: the ludic narrative, which is the story of the player in conflict with the challenges presented by the game. Although this story is experienced, rather than observed, many established storytelling techniques can still be applied. Frustration in the ludic narrative immerses the player in conflict, raising the stakes and increasing the sweetness of the eventual payoff.

The Gateway to Fiero

Fiero is the feeling of triumph over adversity, and is one of the most common emotions experienced in video games. To experience fiero, one must first be faced with adversity. Thereafter, the intensity of fiero correlates with the intensity of the adversity overcome. The intensity of adversity increases with each successive failure, just as in the classic story structure. Thus, frustration is the gateway to fiero.

While fiero is among the most common emotions in contemporary and past video games, it is certainly not the only one, and as the gaming audience expands and more and different tastes are brought into the community, it has been argued by some that the percentage of players who seek fiero will fall. However, I believe that even casual players seek fiero; they just have a different perspective on what it is and why they want it.

Casual Conflict Is Still Conflict

It’s well-known that as the audience for video games has grown, a whole subculture of players has emerged that seems — to us core gamers — shockingly conflict-averse. They gravitate to casual games like Peggle and Bejeweled, and they’ve turned out to be a lucrative market. Core game developers have been looking for ways to bridge the gap and get their hands on that sweet, sweet revenue.

It’s led to a rise in perceived low- or no-frustration games: Prince of Persia, in which you are always snatched away from death at the last moment by your magic-wielding companion, Elika; Oblivion, in which everything auto-levels with you, preventing you from ever encountering anything too powerful; Fable 2, with its string of pearls that obviates the need for critical exploration of the game world. While these are all quality games, they’ve received significant criticism from core gamers who are concerned about the “dumbing down” of our favored pastime.

However, even iconic casual games like Peggle and Bejeweled incorporate frustration into their game designs. In fact, both games feature fiero prominently in their experiences, as do Prince of Persia, Oblivion, and Fable 2. How then do we explain conflict-averse casual gamers that are so attracted to these games?

It’s important to make a distinction here between legitimate and illegitimate frustration. Specifically, some challenges add frustration in a fun, fiero-supporting way, and others feel arbitrary or unfair and detract from the game experience. I wrote about this distinction in some detail a few weeks ago in Failure for Fun and Profit, wherein I proposed the three rules for designing failure:

• Do not break narrative flow
• Provide a clear way forward
• Raise the stakes

The risks of designed frustration arise not from its mere presence, but from poorly-designed failure cases which break one or more of these rules.

A lot of “hardcore” games break at least one of these rules. It may be the harsh punishment of death, so common in arcade-style games, which irrevocably shatters narrative flow. It may be games that take such pride in their difficulty that even when there is no clear way forward, they refuse to help the player out, on sheer principle. It may be games that can’t raise the stakes because their challenges are altogether too arbitrary.

The difference between “hardcore” and “casual” players is simply the amount of tolerance one has for deviation from the rules of failure. Simply put, casual players aren’t willing to put up with our bullshit.

Frustration For Broad Appeal

The break between hardcore and casual isn’t over whether or not a game is difficult. It’s over whether or not a game is fair.

Frustration, correctly applied, is a tool that appeals to both hardcore and casual players. It provides evidence of conflict, which underpins all stories and is the reason we have an audience in the first place. It creates the gateway to fiero, a sensation for which there is evidence that players on both sides of the divide actively seek, even though they have different perspectives on what it is and why they want it. It raises the stakes and makes the payoff oh-so-sweet, regardless of whether the player’s victory is clearing a long chain of blocks or saving the world from evil.

Frustration must be applied with respect to the rules of failure. Done correctly, it creates engaging and rewarding game experiences that feel like they were worth something, rather than a waste of time, and are not relegated to just one corner or another of the industry, but have broad appeal.